Today's De Telegraaf features an extensive interview with Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, leader of anti-Islamization, anti-EU PVV, now polling as the No. 1 political party in the Netherlands.

In a process alarmingly remininscent of old Soviet show trials, Wilders once again must stand trial for exercising his freedom of speech -- the subject of this interview. Backgrounder here.

NB: I have lightly edited the following English translation.

'The verdict seems to be ready'

by Wouter de Winther and Ruud Mikkers

PVV leader Wilders feels provoked. He says he will not get a fair chance to defend himself in the trial in which he is being sued for "group insult" and "incitement to hatred and discrimination." Almost all of his requests to hear experts or to examine...

In this interview, Rep. Louie Gohmert explains that some conservatives were persuaded to support Paul Ryan for Speaker after phone calls with GOP Bigfeet Gingrich and Demint.

It sounds like two-dimensional thriller-stuff, but I guess that's how it's done.

As Gohmert notes, it is Demint's role that is most shocking. That is, here we see a leader of a flagship conservative think tank pressuring conservatives to abandon conservative principles to support pro-amnesty Ryan.

Why the surrender on core conservative issues -- issues, I am assuming, Heritage itself has advanced and defended? Is this more donor-mania? To be sure, the process is perverted.

The conservative House members on the other end of the telephone line, of course, didn't have to be persuaded. But (sigh) precious few take their conservative principles as seriously as Louie Gohmert.

It is a difficult thing to expose the machinations of the powerful. There are undoubtedly unpleasant consequences. But it is...

Robert Strauss sent in the AFP story headlined, "Merkel says migrant influx a fallout from globalisation," adding: "If Mark can sound like Walter, Angela can sound like Angela."

He's right. That is, just as Mark Dayton, the governor of Minnesota, and Walter Luebcke, a German regional council president, speak as if from the same talking points when lecturing their constituents (if you don't like the massive waves of Third World immmigration waving over your state/region, leave), there are echoes to be heard in what longtime Communist revolutionary Angela Davis and long ago Communist nomenklatura member Angela Merkel are saying about same.

Writing at Vdare.com, Paul Kersey makes an important link between two recent sets of political remarks -- political lectures, more accurately.

One was given in St Cloud, Minnesota by Governor Mark Dayton (Target heir, 1960s radical); the other was given in the central German town of Lohfelden by a local official named Walter Luebcke. As Kersey points out, the messages are interchangeable -- and, I would add, interchangeably Leftist.

And what is that message? In Montana and in Germany, citizens are being told by their elected officials that if they do not like the masses of immigrants from the Third World transforming their state or city respectively, they should leave.

Leave? It is hard to know which is more shocking: the animus or the synergy.

Earlier this year, I watched a video via Refugee Resettlement Watch of Angela Davis meeting with "refugees" in Berlin. Listening to their grievances -- they had not received housing, access to good healthcare, etc. -- she thanked the "refugees," and went on to frame their "struggle" as "The Movement of the 21st century."

Such loaded ideological language belies the "humanitarian" narrative that Leftist European Union officials (and US officials) are using to cloak a political agenda as fanatical, as unhinged as that of any Hitler, Stalin or Mao. No, they are not carting off Jews or dissidents by the million. This is "soft" totalitarianism (so far). But their schemes are no less grandiose. These...

A new round of lush profiles re-examines the 14-ct mystique of Tom Wolfe now that his papers, which he sold to the New York Public Library for $2.15 million, are available for research.

That is, I think he sold them in exchange for that goodly fortune. Vanity Fair's Michael Lewis reports the transaction more tastefully: "Back in November 2013, the New York Public Library announced that it would pay $2.15 million to acquire Wolfe's papers...."

Lewis then samples the trove for Vanity Fair. The results are Vanity Fair to a vanity-fair-thee-well, as when Lewis, taking his reluctant young daughter along on his reportorial travels, writes: "So I try all over again to explain why, to travel quickly from Martha’s Vineyard to Long Island, you can’t fly in a normal...

Speaking of 9/11 and who was responsible, when Jeb Bush was asked at a New Hampshire townhall in August about whether he would try to help release the 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 report, he said he didn't know what they are.

There are two potential explanations for Bush’s answer, and neither is flattering to the former Florida governor. Bush is either so poorly informed on national security matters that he is truly unaware of a well-documented and intriguing 13-year old controversy surrounding his brother’s decision to classify a full chapter in the report of a 2002 joint congressional inquiry into September 11, or he was feigning ignorance to dodge discussion of yet another sensitive Bush family topic.

A report from the cultural death spiral shows there limits live. Lines of behavior, too. Too bad they are meaningless. Kardashian Inc., having pioneered new frontiers of exhibitionism, eradicating what tatters of private life and public decorum might have remained in common code, has, in a moment of family grief (see below), agreed to pause the "app" windows on their joint existence.

Not that I consider the K-clan to be evil geniuses, or anything. They are one entrepreneurial family.

France24 reports on a popular French TV weatherman who is off the air after committing the thoughtcrime of publishing a book criticizing the so-called climate change "war machine aimed to keep us in fear."

As reported below -- but too far below for such a sensational fact -- weatherman Phillipe Verdier says he was inspired to write his book "after France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met with TV meteorologists and asked them to highlight climate change issues in their broadcasts."

France's Foreign Minister met with TV weathermen? Local weather reports as a tool of state and diplomatic propaganda?

How do you say "you betcha" in French?

“I was horrified by this speech,” said Verdier -- a bona fide free-thinker,...

The most striking thing about Bernie Sanders' socialist agenda is the dictatorial strain. "It is immoral and wrong," he says (yells), that there is more wealth in the hands of some Americans than in most others, and he is the man to redistribute it.

The next most striking thing about it is how how closely this confiscatory and redistributionist agenda meshes with that of every other Democrat on the stage. That includes James Webb, who indicated support for amnesty and Obamacare for illegals, two of the most powerful engines of confiscatory, redistributionst and, bonus, globalist change. Webb rather naively tells Sanders his "revolution" isn't going to come, but, gosh, hate to tell you, it already did, and with a bang, 80-odd years ago in FDR's New Socialist Deal. Ever since, and with few exceptions, the Democrat and Republican Parties both have driven the socialist agenda forward,...

One thing The Death of the Grown-Up (2007) does is revisit the post-9/11 fate of Western civ as defended (or not) by its own leaders, beginning, perhaps unexpectedly, with Italy's Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian prime minister's spirited declamation in favor of "Western values" in the aftermath of the 2001 Islamic attacks was, shall we say, not well-received in the West. Indeed, European leaders swiftly and widely attacked Berlusconi, demanding that he instead pay homage to "universial values." The "universal values" slogan would be much pressed by George W. Bush and Tony Blair throughout their terms of office.

American Betrayal (2013), the "prequel" to The Death of the Grown-Up, revisits this same theme, I realize, by returning to a historicial...

Surely, we can no longer say it is still in the process ofdying when English girls are prostituted by Muslim immigrant gangs and English men and women do nothing; French girls are slapped around by African immigrants and French men and women do nothing; Sweden is the rape capital of the world (2nd only to Lesotho) and the Swedish authorities (it can hardly claim to be a democracy anymore) open the nation to still more accelerated rates of Islamic/Third World immigration. Germany drives the entire continent to ruin by inviting the Islamic world onto a global dole ... Soon there will be nothing to do.

After the US embraced its "noble ally," the Soviet dictatorship, in December 1941, Harper & Brothers' Cass Canfield (left) called back already distributed review copies of Trotsky's biography of Stalin. Canfield later withdrew My Year in the USSR by New York Times correspondent G. E. R. Gedye. Doubleday, Doran next canceled the spring 1942 publication of One Who Survived, the reminiscences of ex-Soviet diplomat and General Alexander Barmine. Random House's Bennett Cerf (right) takes the cake, though, for proposing that the entire U.S. publishing industry withdraw from sale all books critical of the Soviet Union. No more would be published until after World War II was over.